The Postcards from Port Blakely

The night Vernon left, I did the math on the motel receipt and laughed. Two drinks, one bad game of pool, one very good night, one morning where I watched a man pull his boots on and not ask for my number. Thirty-four years old and I still didn't know how to do that part right.

He did leave something, though. He left a stack of blank postcards by the room phone, the kind the motel sells for fifty cents, with the fog-bell tower printed on them in faded ink. I took the whole stack before I drove out.

* * *

Port Blakely, WA. October.

Dear Vernon Sylvester, because I never got far enough with you to earn a nickname.

The Rusty Anchor burned meatloaf nights on Wednesdays, which you know, because you ate some. I watched you eat it. You said it tasted like "a damp sock with ambition," and I laughed so hard the woman at the next table asked if I was okay. I was not okay. I was losing at pool to a man with forearms like dock rope.

Then you stopped winning and I stopped heckling and you walked me up the outside stairs to room 6 with your hand flat on my back like you were steadying a ladder. I'm putting this on a postcard, where every mail carrier between here and your rig can read it, so let them. You asked before you touched me. Once at the door, and once on the bed with my shirt already gone, like you needed to hear it in both places. I said yes both times. You undressed me slower than anyone ever has, and you went down on me with the fog bell going every forty seconds, and I lost count somewhere around the fifth bell. When you finally got the condom on and slid into me you stopped, all the way in, and just breathed against my neck, and that one pause did more for me than my whole marriage. I came holding the headboard. You came saying something into my shoulder that might have been my name. I couldn't tell. Hence the question below.

This is my first postcard to a man I've known for eleven hours total, counting sleep. The motel smells like fabric softener and old coins. There is a laundromat under my room and a fog bell somewhere past the water that goes off every forty seconds, which I have decided is the town breathing.

Question: do you remember my name? You said it twice in the bar and once in the morning. That's three opportunities. No pressure. But if you get it wrong I will never write again, and you will lose the best pool heckler you've ever had.

I'm on a solo tour. Small towns, small bars, one guitar. I'll send you a postcard from each stop. If you don't write back, I'll assume you're dead in a helicopter accident, which I've heard is a real fear out there, and I'll say something nice at the open mic in your honor.

Sign me, Sophie. There. That's one of your three chances spent for you.

I mailed it in the box outside the post office and felt ridiculous for a full hour. Then I felt good. Then I played a set to nine people and got paid in beer and forty dollars, and felt good about that too. Divorce does strange things. Mine ended two years ago, polite as a library, and I've spent the time since trying to figure out what I actually want instead of what I agreed to. I still don't know. But I know I wanted to mail that postcard.

* * *

His reply came eleven days later, to the general delivery window in Astoria, because I'd sent him my whole route. The card was rig-issue, gray, with a printed line at the bottom that said PROPERTY OF CASPIAN ENERGY. He'd crossed that out.

Sophie (I'm told there was a third chance and I used it, so we're square),

Back on the platform. Day one went like this: wake at 4:40, coffee that could strip paint, safety meeting where a man named Emily made us all say our names and one thing we're grateful for. I said "postcards." Nobody got it. Good.

My bunk is six feet long and I am six-one, so I sleep at an angle like furniture someone returned. The mess serves something called Salisbury steak that is legally not steak. There is a guy here, Walt, who has been on rigs for thirty years and refers to the ocean only as "the neighbor." I like him.

I worked the crane line for nine hours. My hands are wrecked. It's 2 a.m. and the neighbor is quiet, and I'm writing this under my bunk light like a man in prison, which, close enough.

P.S. I do remember. You smelled like rain and bad decisions.

I read it four times. Then I propped it on the motel dresser against the ice bucket, and every time I came back from the bathroom I read it again. The man remembered. The man wrote back. The man smelled like diesel and handwriting I liked.

* * *

Truck stop outside Burns, Oregon. November.

Dear Vernon,

I attempted a song about you. This is a confession, not a compliment.

It started fine. Something in D, a little swing to it, a line about a man who eats meatloaf on principle. Then it turned on me. By verse two I had written "you don't know what you've got till it's gone" and then the word "journey" and then I stopped, because a song that generic could be about a truck, and no offense to trucks.

So I am instead writing you a postcard about failing to write a song. This is either more honest or lazier. I'll let you rule on it.

The truck stop has a beagle statue out front wearing a reflective vest. Nobody I've asked knows why. I ate a hot dog at 9 a.m. because the road makes its own rules. My next gig is a place in Bend where the owner told me on the phone that he "doesn't do cover charges, he does suggestions," and I respect the whole thing deeply.

One question, and I'd like a straight answer, which I understand is hard from a man sleeping at an angle: are you writing back because you're bored?

Be honest. I've been bored into a lot of bad hobbies myself. I once took up whittling for a month.

Sophie

* * *

His answer took two weeks. When it came, half the front was a drawing. A pelican, done in ballpoint, standing with its head thrown back and its beak wide open like it was mid-yell. Under it he'd written, in block letters: WISH YOU WERE HERE, BUT NOT REALLY.

Sophie,

Minor incident yesterday. A wrench slipped off the deck plate and took Walt on the shin. Not bad. He bled some, swore in a way that would embarrass a poet, and was back on shift in an hour. The medic taped him up and Walt told the medic he'd "had worse from the neighbor," and the medic, who is